Osteoporosis not just a woman's problem

Few men are aware of the risk, and fewer still are screened and treated

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Paula Span NEW YORK - Dr Ronald Klein was cycling around his neighbourhood in North Wales, Pennsylvania, in 2006 and tried to jump a kerb.

As the bike toppled, he thrust out his left arm to break the fall. It did not seem like a serious accident, yet he could not get up.

At the emergency room, X-rays showed that he had fractured both his hips, which required surgical repair, and his shoulder. Dr Klein, a dentist, went back to work in three weeks, using a cane. After about six months and plenty of physical therapy, he felt fine.

But he wondered about the damage the fall had caused. "A 52year-old is not supposed to break a hip and a shoulder," he said.

He had a bone-density scan at a follow-up visit with his orthopaedist. As he suspected, the test showed that he had developed osteoporosis, a progressive condition, increasing sharply with age, that thins and weakens bones and can lead to serious fractures.

He began a drug regimen and, now 70, remains on one.

MEN HAVE WORSE OUTCOMES FROM FRACTURES

Osteoporosis occurs so much more commonly in women for whom medical guidelines recommend universal screening after age 65- that a man who was not a healthcare professional might not have thought about a scan.

About one in five men older than 50 will suffer an osteoporotic fracture in his remaining years, and among older adults, about a quarter of hip fractures occur in men.

When they do, men have worse outcomes, said Dr Cathleen ColonEmeric, a geriatrician at the Durham VA Health Care System and Duke University and the lead author of a recent study of osteoporosis treatment in male veterans.

"Men don't do as well in recovery as women," she said, with higher rates of death (25 to 30 per cent within a year), disability and institutionalisation. "A 50-year-old man is more likely to die from the complications of a major osteoporotic fracture than from prostate cancer," she added.